


Focus

by generaljanuary



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anxiety, Family, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Growing Up, Hogwarts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marauders' Era, Years 1 Through 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 17:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/generaljanuary/pseuds/generaljanuary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Focus: The distinctness or clarity of an image rendered by an optical system. Or the story of how Remus went to Hogwarts, learned to look outside of himself and made friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Focus

11.

A few days before he first leaves for Hogwarts, Remus’ mom pushes the door to his bedroom open and asks if she may speak to him. Remus closes his book and folds his legs to make place for her to sit on his bed. She smiles at him sadly and tells him there’s something his dad always wanted him to know. “But you know how your father is with words.”  
That’s when he first hears Fenrir Greyback’s name. That’s when he learns why his dad always walks like he is in a porcelain shop.

When Remus arrives at Hogwarts, he isn’t especially small, or especially quiet or especially anything. He just is. Doomed - and maybe a little determined - to slip through the cracks of memory. He observes, notices and remembers people the same way he learnt all the loose, creaky floorboards at home. So he can carefully make his way around them, even in the dark. It’s not avoidance, not really. He laughs when he overhears a joke or witnesses a prank, sometimes follows other kids around. He sits with his peers during mealtimes and says “Pass the salt.” and “Thank you, please.”.

At the end of his first week at school, he gets an emotional letter from his mom, telling him how he’s her little man out in the world now. He quickly closes his fist around it and shoves it at the bottom of his book bag, feeling his ears burning up. But he’s seen her post-scriptum. “Your father says ‘Be good.’ He polished your coin collection last night. Said he found a new one you might find interesting. It’s from Canada, of all places.” When Remus squeezes his eyes shut, he sees bright colours exploding on the inside of his eyelids and waits a few beats for them to fade before he opens his eyes again.

When he gets handed his copy of the annual house picture, a few days later, he notices with contentment how he doesn’t stand out at all among all the other fidgety students squaring their shoulders and rearranging their hair. His average height scored him a place in the middle row and he is just another small smile in a sea of dark robes. Furthermore, two of his classmates are pushing and shoving each other in the bottom right corner of the picture. One of them even falls down the bleachers they were arranged on, flailing abundantly in a flurry of dark robes. Remus chuckles to himself and traces the arc of the boy’s fall with his index finger, obscuring his own face with the pad of his thumb. He owls the picture home with a letter to his parents telling them how everything is alright, just fine, normal. P.S. Tell dad I’m looking forward to Christmas break so I can have a look at that Canadian coin with him.

Remus never knew how to feel whenever his mom told him he’d inherited his father’s silence.

Some time after he was bitten, when he was still too young to know better, Remus had asked his dad why everyone had nicer houses than theirs. John Lupin had put one hand on his son’s head of fine hair and the other in the pocket of his worn, patched-up trousers, offering a joyless but soft smile as he uttered one of the only advices Remus remembers hearing from his soft-spoken dad. ”Don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.” So Remus doesn’t.

He dances gracefully in the awkward space in between people and stays awake at night, thinking of soap bubbles bursting when they collide.

He stays awake at night trying to remember how many people there are in the United Kingdom. How many of them are wizards, werewolves. Magically trained werewolves.

He thinks of his first astronomy class and how he had to close his eyes and catch his breath when he saw so many stars. Before, when he used to look at the night sky, he mostly only saw the moon. He knew the stars were there, he just never paid them much attention. Never noticed the sheer number of them. So at night, Remus curls up in a tight ball under his stifling comforter and feels tiny and insignificant. He knows he’s grown three inches since his birthday but he feels like he is getting smaller and smaller.

He doesn’t know why, but he is suddenly struck with a childhood memory of when his parents and him moved into their new house, a shabby cottage in a secluded village. Remus, who had never before been out of the neighbourhood he’d grown up in, had walked around wide-eyed for days. When his mother had teased him about looking like an owl, he had answered, staring at a mama duck crossing a dirt path, her stumbling ducklings in tow, that he felt that his eyes weren’t big enough to look at the world, now. His mom must have told his dad about the anecdote because the next day, Remus was wordlessly handed a worn-looking book on human anatomy along with a warm smile and a careful thumb swipe across one of his raised eyebrows.

When Remus has an unfortunate accident involving his left eye and a chair leg during his third full moon at school, he has to wear an eye patch for a few days and thinks he is going to die of shame. He doesn’t, of course. A few people ask questions and he makes up a story about that slow Hufflepuff poking him in the eye with his wand while trying to perform Wingardium Leviosa. They seem to find the story amusing and Remus commits their laughter to memory, feeling a little proud. He never thought of himself as a funny person. At dinner he is sitting next to a red-haired girl from his year, who looks concerned as she inquires about his eye and he hopes she laughs when he tells her the fake story. She does, but the sound of it is quickly interrupted by the boy sitting across the table from him.  
“Did you know that eyes never grow? You are born with them the size they always will be.”

Remus smiles carefully and opens his mouth to say that he did know that, hoping he won’t sound too breathless, but the other boy – one of his roommates, he realizes - goes on speaking without waiting for his answer.

“It’s a shame for goggle face, here.” He pipes up, elbowing his neighbour who turns towards them, crossing his eyes and faking a confused sound.

Their end of the table burst into laughter.

“You look cool. Like a pirate.” States the boy sitting on his other side after everyone has quieted down.

“Ahoy, Matey!” Exclaims ‘Goggle Face’, his expression back to normal. “Pete’s right, Lupin. I wish I could look like a pirate too. I guess the glasses would kind of kill the coolness of it, though.”

“Oh, Potter. Don’t blame your un-coolness on your glasses, that’s just not fair to them.” The red-haired girl, Evans, chides in an obviously fake sweet tone.

The boy sitting across from Remus guffaws loudly.

“Lupin! Pass the girl a Pumpkin Pasty! She’s a bright one!” He proclaims.

Before Remus has the time to turn his head to look for the plate of pastries that must be in the dead angle of his currently useless left eye, the girl retorts in the same bright tone she used to placate Potter earlier:

“ I don’t think I need your permission to have dessert, Black, but thanks for the compliment.” She smiles and stands up, obviously finished with her meal.

Potter trains his eyes on her as she’s leaving and says, thoughtful : “She thinks my glasses are cool.”

Black snorts and leans forward, placing his hand next to his mouth, as if to confess a secret. Remus finds himself leaning forward as well, without really intending to.

“Not only is the bloke practically blind, seems like he’s deaf too.” Black whispers loudly, his eyes mischievous.

“Or simply brain damaged.” Remus offers, smiling.

“Oh! Quite clearly! Have yourself a Pumpkin Pasty, Matey!”

Black picks up the tray of treats and shoves it in front of Remus, obviously meaning for him to dig in. When Remus reaches for a pastry and misses by about an inch, Black doesn’t frown. He cocks his head to the side, looks at Remus for a few uninterrupted seconds and then looks at Peter and says:

“Have one too, Pete! Everyone who thinks pirates are cool is obvious brilliant!”

Remus doesn’t see Pettigrew, who is sitting on his blind side, but he hears him comment on the fact that surely, everyone thinks pirates are cool.

Later that day, Remus discovers that one undoubtedly underestimates the usefulness of depth perception until one is deprived from it. He bumps quietly into a few walls and almost tumbles down a (currently immobile) moving stairway on his way to Defense Against the Dark Arts. He is afraid someone is going to make a comment about him being on his way to poke out his other eye, but no one seems to notice his sudden clumsiness. His last class is double potion (which he tries very hard to be good at without much results so far) and when he tries to slice his nepenth roots he misses and cuts his finger. He drops the knife and quickly moves away from his cauldron, not wishing to know what colour his attempt at shrinking potion -whatever they were instructed to concoct today- would become when mixed with a few drops of werewolf blood. He goes to stick his wounded fingertip into his mouth but catches himself, looking around and feeling his cheeks burn up with shame. His potion is ruined so his spends the rest of the class frowning unhappily at his cut.

That night, Remus wakes up from a dream in which he was gnawing at wriggling, bloody fingers. His sweaty pyjama top is sticking to his back and a gasp slips from his lips. He rubs at his face, feeling his injured finger smarting from the pressure. He feels a few shameful, frustrated tears escape as he angrily thinks that he can’t wait to be rid of the stupid eye patch. He realizes he is breathing noisily and concentrates on the sound of it until it calms him down. He remembers reading somewhere that one cannot dream of something they have never seen and wonders what blind people dream of. Through the heavy bed curtains he can hear the noises his roommates make in their sleep and wonders what normal people dream of. He briefly thinks about cowardice. He knows it is a bad trait found in bad people so he can’t bring himself to think of his behaviour as being cowardly because he doesn’t think of himself as a bad person. Not most of the time. He whispers in the dark. “I am not a coward. I am being careful.” His father’s sad face flashes briefly in his mind before the quiet snores coming from the other beds – a sound he had never paid any attention to before – lulls him back to sleep.

The next morning when he wakes up, he finds a Muggle plaster on his bedside table and his dorm mates already involved in their respective morning rituals. The exploding colours are back behind his eyelids and his shaky breaths make the wrapper flutter as he tears it open to wrap the tiny bandage around the tip of his left index finger. He blinks at it several times with his one valid eye and he can feel a headache coming on with how hard he is trying to make sense of the situation. Because it makes none. None at all. All of his roommates are pureblooded, he is sure of that. How would one of them come to own something as silly as an adhesive bandage?

He is still a bit baffled at breakfast when he reaches for a piece of bacon and Potter exclaims loudly, pointing at his hand: “What the bloody hell is that!”  
Remus freezes and chokes a bit on his pumpkin juice, feeling everyone turn towards him at once. Lily Evans saves him the explication as she rolls her eyes and starts explaining Elastoplasts, obviously enjoying being able to demonstrate that, contrarily to what his attitude demonstrates, James Potter is obviously not all-knowing and mighty. Peter Pettigrew asks how it holds in place without a sticking charm, and Evans slides into a description of glue, her tone a little less condescending. Remus goes back to his breakfast, glad that everyone’s focus isn’t on his finger, or anywhere near him, anymore and sees that Sirius Black, who is sitting across from him again, is looking at him intently, holding up the plate of bacon that he had been reaching for earlier. Not one of Sirius’ refined features twist into disgust or pity or anything equally stomach-churning when Remus fumbles clumsily to pick up a few slices. Sirius smiles a little and places the platter back on the table. Remus is not sure how much longer he can stand to be stared at so carefully, even if his classmates’ eyes bear no questions or expectations. Black adverts his gaze and is suddenly tugging at Potter’ sleeve, noisily whining at him for eating the last piece of toast and wiping his buttered knife on his friend’s robes, chortling vociferously.

Remus is struck with the thought that Sirius Black can be as quiet as he can be loud.

Later that day, Remus finds that whenever he seems to be unintentionally veering towards a wall, there is always a solid warm body there between him and hard bricks. Potter apparently decided that calling out “Ahoy Matey!” whenever he comes near is the best thing in the world. Pettigrew keeps asking his opinion about their various teachers, supplying tales of pranks Potter or Black performed on them. Asks him if there exists glue strong enough to make two people stick together, because that’s what Sirius did to Severus Snape and Professor McGonagall a few weeks ago.

By the end of the day, the plaster is still solidly clinging to his fingertip and Remus doesn’t let himself formulate a complete thought about silly Muggle glue making people stick together. He feels like the ground he is standing on has shifted to a new angle, but he reasons that it must be the lack of depth perception.

A few days later when he goes to Madame Pomfrey, she takes off the eye patch, tells him “There, good as new!” and he thinks ‘For now.’, but he smiles a real smile nonetheless. He goes to bed and dreams with both his world-seeing eyes of a very distant memory: his father holding him up in the air and spinning on himself, laughing. He dreams of his father the way he was before Remus was bitten.

He wakes up early but rested and pads over to Sirius Black’s bed. He tries to be quiet, but there are simply too many creaky floorboards in the ancient dormitory and he can’t avoid stepping on a few of them. On Sirius’ bedside table, he deposits the eyepatch he convinced Madame Pomfrey to let him keep and returns to his own bed, his heart beating hard against his ribcage.

Remus reflects that he’s found something else he doesn’t think he can afford to lose, so he decides that it’s time for him to invest himself.

*

12.

It’s a few days into November and Adelaide Lupin is busy stitching up a hole in her son’s gloves when she is interrupted by an owl at her window. When she recognizes the bird as one of the school owls Remus usually uses to send his correspondences, she instantly stands up, forgetting all about the pain she has been feeling in her knees since the arrival of the colder and more humid weather. A short, neatly composed letter informs her that everything at Hogwarts is going great, brilliant, perfect and a photograph slips from the envelope. It’s dated from Halloween and in it, her son is obviously impersonating a mummy; the entirety of him is covered in bandages except for his gleaming eyes and a mile-wide smile she can’t quite reconcile with the face it’s on. She startles a little as another boy suddenly comes into the frame, extravagantly wearing an elaborate pirate disguise, completed not only with an eye patch but also with an honest to goodness parrot perched on his shoulder. She shakes her head in amused dismay as the other boy throws an arm around her son’s shoulders and they both pose for the camera.

Later, she asks of her husband that he finds a frame for the picture. He take it from her carefully and after a moment, she feels one of the many bands of anxiousness wrapped around her heart loosen a little. She watches her husband’s face and remembers that her son inherited his smile from his father.

*

13.

After being released from the infirmary wing by a very reluctant Madam Pomfrey, Remus slowly climbs is way up the Gryffindor tower. He is glad that every other student is in class and not around to witness his limp; he has to make a few embarrassing, frustrating halts on his ascension. His legs are trembling beneath him and he does not fancy being found in a heap at the bottom of the stairs once classes are dismissed.

He remembers being a first year and wanting the comfort of home on mornings like this. He remembers missing his bedroom with its familiar smell and just-soft-enough pillow. The soothing sound of his mother’s crocheting in the corner as she watched over his sleep.

Remus feels winded and exhausted and decides to sit on the steps. Just for a second, just to regain his breath, his strengths.

He closes his eyes and thinks of how he felt at odds, recuperating in his bedroom, last summer. How he wished to hear cackles and plotting whispers and the heavy thumps of body against body against floor that meant some sort of wrestling was taking place nearby. His mothers’ quiet knitting had unnerved him, kept him awake and he’d guiltily seen how unsettled his mother was at his restlessness. He’d feigned sleep and heard her slip out of his bedroom, leaving her bundle of yarn behind, quietly, carefully closing the door behind her. He’d lain awake, scratching at his scabs, questioning his sanity. How could he miss his roommates’ Quidditch smells and obnoxious shouting?

Suddenly there are voices around him and he feels disoriented.

“What is he doing there?” a forced whisper.

“Don’t touch him, you prat.”

“Oh, Merlin! Did he pass out, is he okay?”

“Of course he’s not okay, Peter, you almost tripped on him.”

“I didn’t mean to! He’ll know I didn’t mean to, right?”

“Of course. Let it go, you tosser.”

“Can it, both of you, you’ll wake him up.”

Remus opens his eyes and feels his cheeks growing hot, realizing that he must have fallen asleep. Fortunately, only his roommates seem to have found him .

“Hum, guys, what’s the smell?” He scrunches up his nose and looks at them a little more closely and notices that their robes seem to be covered in purple goo. He scoffs. “Forget it, I don’t want to know.”

“Too bad, you’ll hear about it in details.” Sirius grins and helps him up. “What I don’t get is how a potion could go this bad when you weren’t even in the room.”

Remus gets to his feet and winces a little, leaning into his friend, a smile finding its way to his face at the jibe.

“Oh, do shut up.” He laughs weakly.

“You seem okay, though. Not too bad this time?” James inquires.

Remus extends his arms a little, showing that he is indeed whole.

“Peachy.” He says thinly, but still smiling.

James smiles back and pokes him lightly on the shoulder so that he falls back into Sirius, who squawks in outrage but catches him easily and painlessly.

“Now that your sound health has been ascertained, may I be excused, fellas? This handsome face needs to be examined. Some of your disgusting brew splattered on it, Black. If I end up with a weird rash, I swear I will hex you so bad, you’ll croak like the toad you are for at least a week. You coming with, Peter?”

“I couldn’t agree more with you, James. You do need to be examined. Immediately. Hurry Pete, before he loses what is left of his mind. As if you could ever lay a hex on me, Goo-face.” Sirius teases in answer to the mostly empty threat. He then shows Peter a thumb up, signalling that he’s got Remus covered.

Peter answers in kind and grabs James by his robes. “Off we are, Goo-face.”

“Come on, Remus, let’s get you to bed.”

“You didn’t have to do that, Sirius.” Remus says quietly, as they slowly start to climb the remaining stairs, Sirius’ hand hovering over Remus’ back in case he starts feeling weak and needs support.

“Ruin James’ raggedly charming visage? Of course I did. I deeply feel that it was one of my life missions. I feel very accomplished right now.”

Remus chuckles breathlessly as they reach the top of the tower.

“The poor bugger’s chin has never seen a hair in its life and now you’ve gone and traumatized it. Seriously, though, a stunt like that? Slughorn must’ve turned a fetching shade of red.”

As an answer, Sirius offers an exaggerated self-satisfied grin as he opens the door to their dorm and gestures Remus in.

“All of that trouble just so you could check on me?” Remus asks disbelievingly, rolling his eyes.

“You think very highly of yourself, Remus Lupin. That is not a fetching trait.” Sirius scoffs in a practiced reproving tone.

“Sirius, you are incorrigible.” Remus admonishes in a very real reproving tone.

“Why, thank you! That’s the nicest thing you’ve told me today.”

“You’re an arse.”

“Stop! Stop showering me with compliments, you know how vain I get.”

“Yeah, and that is definitely not your most fetching trait.” Remus quips as he grabs the drawn curtain around his four posters bed and tugs it out of the way with a harsh gesture.

He freezes in place, hand still gripped tight in the red velvet, staring at his bed. It is almost entirely covered in hundreds of individually wrapped adhesive bandages. Remus’ vision swims before his eyes and he only manages to stay upright because of his white-knuckled grip on the curtain and Sirius’ hand on his back.

“Get in bed before you keel over, Remus.” Sirius says quietly, warmly.

He pushes just a little at the small of Remus’s back and watches his friend collapse into bed, still looking dumbfounded.

“You are mental.” Remus stammers out, grabbing a handful of plasters.

“And covered in purple goo.” Sirius adds solemnly.

“Have I stumbled upon some weird secret contraband of muggle medical supplies?”

“Nope, just your bed. Go to sleep. You’re so tired you are probably hallucinating this.”

Unless Sirius is right, Remus thinks he sees a small blush on his friend’s features. Sirius looks away quickly and closes the curtain.

“I thought you’d get back before us. I just wanted you to see something nice.” His voice is muffled by the heavy drapery.

Remus hears Sirius bump into someone’s bedside table as he presumably makes his way to the bathroom to clean up. Muted curses reach his ears and he chuckles and burrows deeper into is bed, shaking his head in wonder at the sound of crumpling elastoplasts wrappers beneath his back. He closes his eyes and remembers that the most surprising thing about his friends finding out about his lycanthropy is that he hadn’t been mind-blowingly surprised by their acceptance.

When he wakes up a few hours later, he can hear Sirius practicing a complicated charm in the bed next to his. When he smiles, he feels something pulling at the skin of his face. He reaches up and realizes that every available surface of skin on his body has been covered in plasters.

*

15.

Adelaide is peeling carrots into her kitchen sink. Every once in a while she waves her wand in the direction of the stove so that the wooden spoon keeps mixing the sauce that is currently simmering in its cauldron. It’s been years and years since she cooked for a guest and she can feel her hands trembling. Her husband has been locked in his study all day long, he hadn’t even come out to greet the boy when he’d arrived earlier today. She sighs and looks out the window.

Her son and his friend are running in the yard, she can hear them laugh more often than not.

It’s well into July and the heat is abusing her poor garden. Only the sunflowers seem to be in good condition, striving and turning towards the sun, away from the shadows cast by the house and the shed.

She thinks she hears barking, but she is a foolish old woman so she shakes her head and goes back to her cooking.

*

16.

Most days, Remus feels like his heart is strung out, stretched too tight around a rhythm that seems to be more akin to a tremble than a beat. The dancing colours are back behind his eyelids more often than he’d like. He doesn’t understand why the anxiety is back when it’s been gone for so many years.

He would like to talk about it with his best friend, but he finds that mostly, he is anxious when Sirius is around. He has been in alarming moods since he’d left his parents’ house and Remus doesn’t know what to tell him. He watches from the sideline and wishes that he knew the subtle art of comforting another person. He wishes that he wasn’t someone whose only dealing method was silence. That his parents had taught him the right words and touches. Remus is a disaster at words and touches.

He is, however, a Sirius expert, so he knows exactly in which secret passage he’ll find his friend. He says nothing at first and simply sits beside him, wringing his hands. He feels like someone is blowing a balloon in his chest, there is no space for him to breathe, for his heart to beat.

“I’m sorry. I’m no good at this.”

“I know, it’s okay.” Sirius’ voice is gravely, like he hasn’t spoken in hours.

“Mostly, I read too many books and in them there are grand, emotional scenes for moments like this and I’m not an emotional kind of person, you know that.”

“I know that.” He agrees.

“You, though, are very much a grand, emotional scene kind of person. Would you like me to make one for you? Would that make you feel better?”

Sirius chuckles half-heartedly and shakes his head.

“It’s alright, Moony.”

“I… I want to give you what you gave me Sirius.” He says quietly, seriously. “I want to give you a plaster.”

“Well you’re in luck, you must still have at least a hundred of those things at the bottom of your trunk.”

“You know what I mean, you wanker.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You are strangely compliant. Should I be scared?”

Sirius lays his head on Remus shoulder and smiles a little.

“No.”

There is a long stretch of silence in which Remus is seriously afraid that he might start to hyperventilate and then:

“I feel like everything I’ve ever known has just turned to ashes.” Sirius murmurs.

Remus chooses his words carefully.

“Didn’t you feel a bit like that in first year? Being sorted into Gryffindor and everything, I mean.”

“Yeah, a bit, and then I started stealing muggle stuff from the muggleborn kids.”

Remus raises an amused eyebrow and thinks that silence may not be that bad a way to cope after all.

“And then I met you. You were so weird with your ugly beige pressed slacks poking from under your too short robes. That distracted me for a while.”

“Glad to be of service with my atrocious wardrobe.” He shrugs and then feels stupid because Sirius’ head is still on his shoulder. “I understand, though.” He whispers. “I can’t wait to move out of my parent’s house. I can’t breathe when I’m over there.”

“I know. I saw how it was last summer. I’m sorry it has to be like this for you. Your parents love you, though. It’s easy to see.”

“If I never met you I’d be like them.” Remus is staring at his hands, unable to look at anything else. “I’d be small and insignificant and mute.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“That makes me feel a little better.” Sirius raises his head and looks at Remus’ face, his smile a little brighter.

Remus frowns suddenly.

“Don’t you feel like your whole life has been leading up to this, though? Who you are compared with who they are? I never met your parents, Sirius, but they sound like the kind of people who make others feel small and insignificant.”

Sirius contemplates this for a moment and then:

“Yeah, Moony. You’re right. You’re not all bad at this, after all.”

Remus smiles bashfully and looks down. He thinks of his father who was brash only once in his life, leading to a disaster and then spent the rest of his life being careful and miserable.

“Hey, Moony. What do you think your life is leading up to.” Sirius sounds playful.

Remus doesn’t even have to think.

“You.”

Sirius doesn’t move away. And his "Oh." does not even sound surprised.

“I’ll do something very brash, now and if it makes you mad we can pretend it was grief-induced, okay?” Sirius says, licking his lips.

Remus feels like his whole body is going to explode.

“You’re a marauder, Padfoot. I’m pretty sure that’s in the job description.” He says breathlessly.

Sirius leans down and kisses him.

*

18.

The flat is small and in the bad part of town, but neither of them care.

“Was that the last box, Moony?” Sirius asks, levitating his stuff around.

“Yes. Oh! No, wait.”

With a ‘Crack!’ he is gone. He aparates back in a few seconds later, holding a potted sunflower.

“That’s from my mom.” He places it on the windowsill.

Sirius frown, looking perplexed.

“I don’t think these are meant to grow in pots.”

“Whatever. We’ll work it out.”

“Yeah. We will.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was my participation to the 2009 rs_games at Livejournal. ( http://rs-games.livejournal.com/56512.html )I never got around to posting it anywhere. 
> 
> Kudos and comments here or at the original post are cherished and memorized to keep me warm on low self-esteem days.


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